The gold and silver was mostly in solid ingots, which had been issued for coining a few at a time. Alexander had larger ideas. The metals poured into his mints, the hand-punched money poured out of them, wearing out the moulds whose many variants can still be seen. Olympian Zeus soon has around him on the obverse the symbols of the lion, and the royal kyrbasia or peaked cap, circled with the mitra, the purple ribbon. It would be a fair guess that in the privacy of his bedroom, Alexander had already tried it on.
He kept giving money away, delighted to be asked for it, which he took as a sign of friendship. Told that some modest sum would be quite enough, he said, “For you to ask, but not for me to give.” But magnificence did not make him pompous. An independent young man among the friends he used to play ball with had obstinately refused to cadge, and heard rumours that Alexander was not pleased with him. At the next game, whenever he got the ball he shied it past the King, who finally called, “What about me?” “You didn’t ask,” he called back; on which, says Plutarch, Alexander laughed and gave him many presents.
Given or spent, the wealth of Susa began to influence history. For centuries it had lain sterile as if still unmined; now it would flow in the track of Alexander and his spendthrift armies. The busy trade routes it created began to Hellenize his empire before he set his hand to the work.
It was at Susa that, mounting the throne of the six-foot-odd Darius, he found his feet would not touch the ground. Someone shoved a low table under them. An old palace eunuch wept; it had been his master’s wine table. Touched by such loyal grief, Alexander began to pick his feet up; but Philotas pointed out the good omen, and he changed his mind.
Among his loot was the ancient spoil of Xerxes carried back from Athens; including the archaic bronze statue group of Harmodius and Aristogiton, the tyrannicide lovers, from the Acropolis. This precious monument he later returned to Athens, where it still stood in Arrian’s day. He held victory sacrifices and a torch relay race. Fresh troops joined him from Macedon.
The Persian satrap was reinstated again, with a garrison under Macedonian command. Here, at Susa, he installed Sisygambis and her grandchildren in the harem from which Darius had carried them out to war. The great scene would never now be played; and he had a rough road ahead, up the mountain passes into Persis.
Here he met his first resistance since Gaugamela. The Uxian hill people sent to say the kings always paid them road toll to use their passes. Confident banditry now ceased to pay. Susian guides showed him a back stair to their fastness, and he trapped them in. He considered expelling the whole tribe from its strategic habitat; but the chief, a kinsman of Sisygambis, smuggled a messenger through to Susa, begging her to intercede. After some hesitation she wrote to Alexander. It was the first favour she had ever asked of him; he at once issued a general pardon, and, for good measure, tax exemption as well.
Between him and Persepolis, the impregnable pass of the Persian Gates was defended by the satrap of Persis, who had closed its gorge with a wall. From the cliffs above, his men flung boulders; it was a death trap and Alexander soon withdrew his troops. By one of history’s revenges the story of Thermopylae was now acted in reverse. A local shepherd among the prisoners offered to show a route round the pass. Alexander promised a rich reward, and followed. The track, far longer and more dangerous than that over which Ephialtes led Xerxes’ men, was under deep snow as well; but he and his small force scrambled briskly along it. When he surprised the advance guard of the Persians, they behaved just like the Phocians of Leonidas; escaped as best they could into the hills, without warning their commander, who was taken quite unawares. The main Macedonian army then forced the pass without trouble. Persepolis lay open.
Here no one was in a position to offer formal surrender. Instead Alexander got a panic message from its treasurer that the city was in anarchy, and that unless they made haste, the treasure (for which he evidently feared to be held responsible) would be looted.
The fate of Persepolis, thus tilting in the scales, was probably decided by an encounter on the road. In the confusion thousands of Greek slaves (presumably from Greek Asia Minor) escaped and came to meet Alexander’s army. Some were elderly men, who must have been in slavery since Ochus’ wars. It was a macabre and hideous embassy. Diodorus says,
All had been mutilated. Some lacked hands, some feet, some ears and noses. They were men who had learned skills and crafts and done well in training; after which their other extremities had been cut off and they were left only with those on which their work depended.
Curtius says they had been branded too. Both sources agree that Alexander wept for them.
He offered to give them transport home and provide for their remaining lives. Conferring, they decided that to return to their cities as repulsive freaks would be unendurable. By now they would be forgotten there. (Ancient Greece was not notable for compassion; Alexander’s was felt as rather eccentric.) Some had slave wives who had borne them children. They asked for a grant of land where they could live together. He allowed that they were right; gave them money, seed grain and livestock, good clothes for themselves and for their women; and appointed them their sad village.
Next day he marched upon Persepolis. His soldiers got what they had been straining at the leash for ever since Gaugemela—a wealthy city to sack.
It was the ceremonial capital of the empire; the opulent counterpart of little Aegae in Macedon. The King and his chief nobles had seats there; a rich merchant class must have supplied them. Curtius says that many citizens were casually killed because the loot-sated troops could not be bothered with ransoms. It is difficult today, yet some attempt should be made, to imagine the orgiastic pleasure of a sack to men of the ancient world who after hardship and danger felt it to be their due; where power, aggression, greed, lust, rivalry, the instincts of the hunter and the gambler, could be roused and fed in one vertiginous stream of action. No one, perhaps, but Alexander could have held them back at Babylon and Susa. Now he gave them a day at it. Even so he issued orders that the women should not be stripped of the jewels they wore.
The treasurer was promoted to governor. He had saved the palace strongrooms intact. Their contents amounted to three times as much as had been taken at Susa.
Darius wintered at Ecbatana, watched by Alexander’s intelligence for signs of life. There being none, Alexander wintered in Persepolis. It must have been at this time that he made his long-awaited pilgrimage to the tomb of Cyrus the Great at neighbouring Pasargadae, his ancient capital in what had once been Elam; a small Persian Macedon from which he too had conquered an empire. Here, as the sequel shows, Alexander paid him honour. If he had earned it, so had Xenophon; but the rewards of history are capricious. Between them, Persian and Athenian, they had impressed on an eager mind, when no one else was doing it, that all men are God’s children, and that anywhere among them may be found the excellent ones whom, said Alexander, he makes more his own than the rest.
He returned to the palace of Persepolis, with its tall lotus-topped columns and endless reliefs of tribute bearers bringing offerings to its builder, Darius the Great. We hear of no such regal ceremonies as had marked his stay at Babylon or Susa; perhaps only because winter had made access difficult. When spring came, and it was time to march, he burned the palace down.
This action is known today by people who know virtually nothing else about him (and who remain more impressed by this outrage to an empty building than by the living holocausts of Coventry and Dresden); fit retribution, if he deserved it, for a man who cared intensely about his good name. The sources are not unanimous (though nor are they irreconcilable) as to why he did it, and historians debate the matter still.